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Fiddle mail #2: The violin is a voice is a violin

In high school, when everyone in my orchestra was struggling to really nail their vibrato technique, our conductor told us that the violin is in many ways an instrument for approximating the human voice. This is why we use vibrato in classical music, he said.

Yesterday, in my first fiddle lesson with a new teacher, when it was time for me to start puzzling out a new tune that I was learning by ear, she told me to listen and try to sing along the first time she played it. Singing it would give me a good understanding of the phrasing and flow I would aim for when playing the tune, she said.

There are multiple musical traditions that use phonetic singing styles to teach tunes: what comes to mind immediately is canntaireachd, a scottish singing style used to teach pipe tunes. You sing in canntaireachd to learn the tune. Vowels are for the notes of the melody, and consonants are for ornaments. This also makes me think of classical Indian music and how certain syllables correspond to specific tones.

Hi, friends!

Gosh, I hope you're all doing well. Thanks for subscribing to my podcast!

If you've heard or read me talk about anything in the last 5 months, you've probably heard me talk a LOT about fiddle. I've been playing fiddle since before 8th grade, and I've realized over the past years that it's a core aspect of my life. I've really been getting back into it this year after settling into Portland and finding its traditional music communities.

Lately I've been playing around with cross tunings¹ after my friend Kate² told me about Calico³ tuning. Normally a violin is tuned to GDAE, with G being the lowest string and E the highest. In that tuning, the strings are all a perfect fifth⁴ apart from the next highest string, which sounds nice enough when you play them at the same time. In Calico tuning, you tune the strings to AEAC#; the A and E are still a fifth apart, but you have one low A and another A an octave higher. The A and C# make a major third⁵, which means they sound real nice when you play them together, and if you add on the E you have an A major chord. All this means that Calico tuning is basically a free chord you can saw away on without even putting your fingers down on the fingerboard. (One of its siblings is sort of jokingly called Galico, which I've also heard called emo calico hehe).